July – 45 Articles

With SL Viewer 3.3.3 (260300) Jun 21 people started to have more problems with large groups. Any group over and near 10,000 members is considered large. When opening these groups the viewer would lock up. See: #SL Viewer Problems.

Baker Linden struggled with trying to fix the existing Large Group queries. Later in the moth Baker starts moving the query to the new HTTP protocol system.

July was the month when issues with UDP throttling came out. The simple fix is keeping viewer bandwidth set below 1900kbp. See the link immediately above. At the end of the article is a link to a great explanation of the Max Bandwidth setting.

In July Nyx Linden explained the plans for server side avatar baking and announced they are just getting started on the project. It wouldn’t be until December that we get the ETA of late February 2013 for completion of the project.

The first week of July more people are noticing the long roll times for server updates. Oskar explained the longer times are due to the new infrastructure and roll process. See #SL News Week 26 & 27 for his explanation.

A problem comes to light of phantom prims turning into solid prims. SVC-8030

Falcon Linden announces that Havok version 2012 will be the version used in the viewer to run Pathfinding Tools. He also points out having a SSE2 capable CPU is more and more important for running SL.

Pathfinding Tools made it into the Dev Viewer. More regions are added to the PF-RC channel in the main grid.

Nyx Linden discussed the collision bone alternate to the Mesh Deformer. The only real information was that the Lindens are taking a serious look at it. As the year progresses the process looks less desirable.

I find out in July that the standard SL skeleton has 77 bones and that it may be possible to animate all 77.

Word came out that the hardware upgrade continued moving forward.

CCIIUG had its first meeting. It was announced that this was a chance for fashion designers to contribute to the development of SL. In hindsight I should have taken it to be an example of how programmers and artistic designers have so little common ground on which to communicate. See CCIIUG.

Network issues stopped a roll out and blocked logins in the second week of July. It was quickly fixed but threw off the rollout schedule.

Discussion on region crossing issues because of mismatched Havok versions continues. Several possible solutions to mitigate the problems were discussed. Eventually RC channels are rearranged to reduce problems. SL sailors were having problems with their events. So, the Blake Sea regions were moved into a single channel. The problems came from the Havok upgrade needed for Pathfinding, which was taking a long time to pass RC testing.

The scripting user group closed this month. Kelly folded it into Andrew’s Server & Scripting group, which later folded into Maestro’s Beta Server group.

Maestro Linden announced that SVC-7727 was fixed. That turned out to be not completely true… the specific problem was fixed but login and inventory problems continued. One must keep changing passwords and waiting 24 to 48 hours until the problem clears up on their account. It is a tedious trial and error, but it is a work-around.

In July the One Voice fund raiser is run for Gala Phoenix’s legal fund to fight a flagrant case of DMCA abuse. See: Fund Raiser DMCA Abuse and N-Core at Fund Raiser.

SLCC, the annual community convention is canceled. See: AvaCon Abandons SLCC 2012.

The subject of a consensus on the Mesh Deformer came up. I took a poll to see what people were thinking. See: The Consensus.

Torley Linden put out a new video tutorial.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0s1AtF5Fs]

Google ended their free translation service in December 2011. In July Microsoft ended theirs. See: #Second Life Translation Bump.

In July we start to learn that Linden Lab’s SL Viewers will be less and less compatible with OpenSim grids.

In July the Firestorm Viewer became the most stable viewer available for Second Life. It will continue to hold that position for the remainder of the year.

The Advanced Creator Tools rollout to the main channel. See: Second Life News Week 29 and SL Blog: First Set of Advanced Creator Tools Launched Today.

This month we heard more rumors of Runitia Linden working on the viewer’s render pipeline.

Simon Linden added a feature to the viewer’s script editor. Start typing a function or event name and then wait for the tool tip. Then press TAB to have it injected into the code. Try it then it will make sense.

In July I published some stats about the users of my blog. See: Some Stats on Second Life Users.

Cloth simulation comes up in CCIIUG. We won’t see it for some time in SL. I think years.

Oskar Linden explained the hectic schedule around rollouts.

Rumors on the Materials System were taking on more body in July. Eventually the rumors prove true.

The first articles on the imminent demise of the Phoenix Viewer appear. My article gets into the reasons and the new features coming to SL that spell the end of Phoenix.

The consolidation from 3 to 2 data centers continued and complicated the third week’s rollouts. To some extent it also confused the region organization previously done to improve performance.

A new HTTP Project Viewer was released in July.

More people suffered the problem of mixed up images in the Market Place.